The Spanish are generally an easy-going people, happy to be a little early, or more likely, a fraction late for an appointment. They will – and this is part of their charm – round things upwards: an extra dollop on your ice-cream or a shrimp on your tapa.
Only the statisticians will be prone to the sin of exactness, of putting a number down to several decimal points. They would probably get fired if they said something like ‘half of the customers were satisfied’ rather than ‘49.27% admitted to being pleased’.
Well, they use a comma where we use a point, so it would be: ‘49,27 per cent’.
That’s out of a hundred (although only 99 people were there, plus a small dachshund).
Our bean-counter, working for the INE – the Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas – is paid to be exact, but his numbers will not make sense to anyone except another accountant. He might claim that ‘85,056,528 foreign visitors visited Spain in 2023’, where a mathematician would probably say ‘85,060,000 foreign visitors’ and a journalist would lead with ‘something over eighty-five million visitors’.
Who is going to remember, or even read properly, that first number from the INE?
Secondly, of course, despite being exact, it is hopelessly misleading and wrong. Did they count the people in transit through the airport to another foreign destination? How about the cruise ship passengers, or the people who drove across the border from Portugal? What about the ones who stayed… or live here as foreign residents?
It’s a useful figure to draw political conclusions maybe, or to contrast with the year before or after, but not much beyond concluding what we already knew: a whole lot of tourists.
Our favourite example of this anal delight in myopically clicking away at the abacus next to a flickering candle comes from a Canary Islands newspaper: ‘In July this year Lanzarote recorded just over 275,363 tourists according to the Lanzarote Data Centre’. 
A confusingly exact figure, although the article suggests maybe they missed one somewhere…
But hey, at least they couldn’t drive there.
The problem then, is not the exactitude of the numbers fielded by the statisticians, but the error that they can easily make, which in turn breeds false results. Otherwise, why bother to add them up anyway?
A town’s population is based on its padrón: its official census. That doesn’t mean that it’s right, what with long-term visitors, people who are registered in one town but living in another (for a variety of reasons), sundry vote-stuffing activities, foreigners who either aren’t on the padrón, or maybe have moved away without taking their names off the list.
Let’s be fair though – the information is provided painstakingly and to the last level of accuracy, as is to be expected. On the other hand, there’s the concept of ‘garbage in, garbage out’, where the numbers are just plain wrong, due to false information, or corners cut. Take the Spanish fiscal information, the Gross Domestic Product – used, says Wiki, ‘to measure the economic health of a country or region’, and thus very important for comparison, European funding, reputation and so on.
From elDiario.es we read ‘The main official indicator of the Spanish economy, the GDP figure, is wrong. The National Institute of Statistics (INE) has been measuring it incorrectly for at least three years. At best, we are talking about a huge negligence, the most serious in the history of Spanish statistics, the one that will cost us the most…’
The title to this story is ‘The most expensive statistical error in history’. Not good. The methodology which may have worked in the past is now obsolete – there are simply more useful figures available.
Another headline says: ‘Official statistics admit a deviation of 32,480 million euros in the Spanish GDP. The INE carries out the largest revision in its history and corrects upwards, for the third time, the growth data of the Spanish economy in 2021’. Naturally, the lower figures for 2021 (following on from the Pandemic) paved the way at the time for opposition attacks on the Government: “These are your green shoots? This is where we came out stronger?”…and so on.
A sober report from The Corner says ‘The main change that has caused this increase in the volume of GDP is mainly due to the incorporation of the information derived from the new Population and Housing Census 2021, which has led to an increase in the number of inhabitants and, therefore, this has an impact on GDP…’
Sometimes, a journalist may need to go to the INE page. It’s hard to find the information one is looking for on this complicated site when one visits there and also, at least with the Firefox web-browser, when we do, we get a sinister ‘Warning: Potential Security Risk Ahead’ which is a bit off-putting.
They need to not only buck up their ideas, but also their Internet presence.
Thus many news-sites will make up their own numbers, based perhaps on their experience, their politics, or perhaps on other more-or-less reliable sources.
…
Note: The Europeans use a different mathematical nomenclature from the Americans and British. The Google translation of ‘32.480 millones de euros’ correctly reads – for Anglo readers – as ‘32.48 billion’. This is to do with ‘the long and short scale’, a confusion one doesn’t want to make.
Just to be clear, a Spanish billón (a ‘thousand million’ or 109) is the same as an American million million (that’s to say, a trillion).
Silly? Hey, they still use Fahrenheit.